Bootleggers and Pirates
By Rick Boettger
Longtime local and Hemingway First Novel Award winner Rick Skwiot has retreated up north as so many of us do. He channeled Hemingway in his numerous Key West and Mexican novels, and now has taken our pirate heritage back to his Midwestern roots.
His most recent and, I think, best novel is The Bootlegger’s Bride, set in Skwiot’s Missouri homeland. The idyllic lakeside cottage and Polish immigrant blue-collar urban community is the same setting as his critically acclaimed childhood memoir Christmas at Long Lake, but the characters are poignantly enhanced fictional versions of him and his real family.
Most vividly, A.J.’s dad is a wealthy bootlegger. Like a pirate, both dashing and dastardly. The drama of his life and early World War II death, and its effect on A.J. and his tragically flawed mom, are remarkably well woven in a precise series of flash-backs and -forwards that really worked for me, and I usually resist what can be pretentious literary shenanigans.
Here, the complex plot unfolds and reveals itself in the ways our real memories work, which is rarely sequential. One remembrance leads to another, backward, forward, sideways, poignant, joyous. Kept me turning the pages to see what happens next, while holding the plot and the characters straight. A.J.’s Godfather Bogdan, a first-generation Polish-American gambler like Skwiot’s actual father, and a mentor to both A.J. and his late father, is surprisingly central to one of the plot’s most dramatic twists.
While moving right along with the novel’s swirling flow, my own Midwestern roots slowed me down for many of Skwiot’s natural asides, which evoke that chill northern milieu better than my own lived experience did. For example:
“The two men clad in canvas hunting jackets and carrying shotguns marched across the morning field of short beige and gray weeds, boots crunching through the snow. A dull sun hung low behind a leaden blanket of clouds. The air smelled good and clean and stung his face. On the horizon a wisp of white smoke rose into the gray sky from a distant farmhouse.”
The Bootlegger’s Bride is available on Amazon, locally at Island Books, and wherever books are sold.
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